The giant beetle, a, is a monster in NetHack. Unlike the rest of its insectoid brethren, it is very slow, moving at half the speed of the player, and thus not usually seen as a significant threat. They do hit fairly hard, however, so take care if you have poor HP or AC. Their corpses are poisonous, but have a 33% chance to convey poison resistance.

On some systems, dark gray items and creatures will be displayed as blue instead. This makes it easy to confuse giant beetles with their much more dangerous cousins, soldier ants.

The common name for the insects with wings shaped like
shields (_Coleoptera_), one of the ten sub-species into
which the insects are divided. They are characterized by
the shields (the front pair of wings) under which the back
wings are folded.